Business Administration (B.S.)

Finance Concentration

In virtually every business, from the bank to the boardroom, financial skills are in demand and offer many opportunities for finance students. Our alumni work as revenue specialists, financial planners, bank managers, security analysts, portfolio managers, insurance underwriters, and corporate treasurers.

In our finance concentration you'll study macro- and microeconomics and receive a thorough grounding in the mechanisms and methodologies of financial markets and institutions. Take advantage of terrific internship opportunities and our Center for Trading and Analysis of Financial Instruments, or "trading room," with its access to the same full spectrum of data available to professionals on Wall Street. These are just some of the many ways we make sure you'll be ahead of the curve.

A Treasure of Financial Data

Just wait until you see our trading room, with its access to more than 125 sources of stock, bond, commodity, and business data from all over the world. Or rather, don't wait. We're one of the few undergraduate institutions in the world where the ticker runs on real time -- Wall Street time. (You might notice a delay -- if you can measure a quarter of a second. That's the lag time between the exchanges and our data.)

The real treasure in the trading room, however, is Thomson One, a specialized software package developed by Thomson Reuters. The software gives you all the tools necessary to interpret, analyze, and monitor equities, options, futures, commodities, and other valuable market information. Such sophisticated software allows our faculty to teach courses that give you hands-on experience in securities trading and a deeper understanding of financial markets and trends. And with courses such as the Real Time Portfolio Management class, you can gain investment experience by managing an actual stock portfolio -- using real dollars.

Other software packages in the trading room include Palisade's @RISK, a statistical risk-analysis tool, and Closed End and ETF Funds, which presents data on over 500 mutual funds and 100 indices around the world.

The trading room has also nearly doubled in size since it moved to the school's new home, the Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise. With dual monitor setups at each of the 44 workstations, the trading room mirrors the exciting atmosphere of real Wall Street firms.

Staffing the trading room are members of Core Trading Consultants, a group of students trained in investment analysis who can help you negotiate the fine points of the Paris Bourse or the intricacies of option pricing. You'll be able to uncover business stories in the making, before they hit the Wall Street Journal or the evening news.